Before reading this document, make sure that you understand the key concepts behind SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management. The following documentation will help you learn about the recommended approach to capacity management and provide context for helping you understand how to make effective use of the information in this document, and also define the terms used throughout this document.

For more conceptual information about performance and capacity that you might find valuable in understanding the context of the data in this technical case study, see the following documents:

This white paper describes an actual SharePoint Server 2010 environment at Microsoft. Use this document to compare with your planned workload and usage characteristics. If your planned design is similar, you can use the deployment described here as a starting point for your own installation.

This document includes the following:

Specifications, which include hardware, topology and configuration

Workload, which is the demand on the farm that includes the number of users, and the usage characteristics

The SharePoint Server 2010 environment described in this document is a production environment at a large, geographically distributed company. Employees use this environment to track projects, collaborate on documents, and share information within their department. This environment is also used for internal testing, and is frequently upgraded to the latest SharePoint Server pre-release versions as they become available.

As many as 9,000 unique users visit the environment on a busy day, generating up to 470 requests per second (RPS) during peak hours. Because this is an intranet site, all users are authenticated.

The information that is provided in this document reflects the departmental collaboration environment on a typical day.

This section provides details about the server computers that were used in this environment.

Note

This environment is scaled to accommodate pre-release builds of SharePoint Server 2010 and other products. Hence, the hardware deployed has larger capacity than necessary to serve the demand typically experienced by this environment. This hardware is described only to provide additional context for this environment and serve as a starting point for similar environments.
It is important to conduct your own capacity management based on your planned workload and usage characteristics. For more information about the capacity management process, see Panoramica del dimensionamento e della gestione della capacità per SharePoint Server 2010.

The default is 5 seconds. Lowering this setting can save bandwidth and CPU on the database server.

Database Server – Default Instance:

Max degree of parallelism

1

The default is 0. To ensure optimal performance, we strongly recommend that you set max degree of parallelism to 1 for database servers that host SharePoint Server 2010 databases. For more information about how to set max degree of parallelism, see max degree of parallelism Option (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=189030).

The following charts show the average CPU utilization and latency for this environment:

In this document, latency is divided into four categories. The 50th percentile latency is typically used to measure the server’s responsiveness. It means that half of the requests are served within that response time. The 95th percentile latency is typically used to measure spikes in server response times. It means that 95% of requests are served within that response time, and therefore, 5% of the requests experience slower response times.